


The Unseen

by asktheravens



Category: Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ghosts, Illnesses, M/M, Teenagers, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 13:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asktheravens/pseuds/asktheravens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki learns to see the spirits who share his world, and the lonely prince finds both a powerful friend and an ancient enemy.  When something only he can perceive threatens the life of his beloved brother, he will have to turn to one of them for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Autumn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MartyMc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartyMc/gifts).



> This story was a response to this lovely artwork: http://marty-mc.tumblr.com/post/63285311260/
> 
> And the conversation I had with Marty about it; she was nice enough to let me write about her gorgeous drawing, so I hope she enjoys it! The idea of Loki seeing the nature spirits was hers, but I of course couldn't resist adding ghosts to the mix.
> 
> This story is totally unrelated to Thor 2: The Dark World as it was mostly complete before I even saw it.

In the spring of his fourteenth year, Loki learned to see the spirits that had always been there.  He was doing something he wasn’t supposed to at the time; his mother had warned him not to explore his magic on his own, but he never heeded her.  As he concentrated, feeling the flow of seidr like the breath in his lungs, he tried to reach for the reservoir of power he could feel within himself but never tap.  He didn’t reach it, but some aperture in his mind opened up, like sunlight pouring into an abandoned room, and the sudden shock of it, the utter vulnerability, left him near panic.  Whatever he had breached in his haste, he couldn’t slam it shut, and he waited for the blow of consequences.

None came, except his skin felt raw and prickly, and every slight current in the air, every smell, every mote of dust seemed full of strange and prophetic import.  Loki retreated to the little-used western wing of the palace, heading for his favorite secluded thinking spot.  Thor alone could sometimes find him here, but he wouldn’t be looking.  He was sixteen now and spent more and more of his days shut in with their father, feigning wisdom over dusty maps and scrolls as the unfamiliar feelings of confusion and inadequacy clouded his eyes.  Loki had even found him in the library, of all places, and though his first instinct was to tease, the look of despair on his brother’s face had stopped him.  Their last adventure together had been Loki helping him stumble through the difficult wording of an old Vanir treaty so he would not fail Odin’s examination three days in a row.  Loki tried not to be bitter.  He had his lessons mostly with Mother, a vastly preferable outcome, and he told himself Thor still loved him and was only paying the price for his years of inattention and skiving off from his tutoring sessions.

The western wing was the most ancient part of the palace, dark and cool and cramped instead of golden and airy, full of twisting corridors and odd niches.  It had a sour smell and only dim torches for light; there were tombs down here, trophy rooms full of tribute from forgotten wars with dead races, and who knew what else.  Once he’d found a room full of fresh butter, incongruous in the grim surroundings, and another time a gallery of worn but exquisite tapestries, portraits of his parents when they were young, or maybe ancestors from even longer ago.  He’d never found either of those rooms again, but he liked wandering among the secrets down here.  Usually it was soothing, but in his hypersensitive state he found it difficult to lose himself in his thoughts.  He heard a faint sound slowly coming clearer and clearer, a far off muffled crying.  Turning from his usual path, he followed it.

He never found the source, for the weeping seemed to change directions even as he was standing still, listening for it with all the strength of his newly honed senses.  He went through a cramped doorway that had been partially built over and on the other side was a low-ceilinged wide corridor.  The sound stopped, leaving him alone in the hall, and he realized this had been the grandest part of the palace once, when it was new.  Reliefs carved in the walls told a crumbling, unfamiliar story and somewhere in the darkness water dripped on the crudely dressed interlocking stones.  Loki felt something was watching him, something hungry and wrong, and he tried to back out the narrow doorway without turning away from whatever he had disturbed.

The Mad King’s spirit formed on the raised dais where a long-absent throne had left rusty stains.  He honed in on Loki and swept toward him, a strangely colorless figure that the young prince could nonetheless make out in great detail.  His eyes were the worst, glittering with total lunacy in his craggy, once-handsome face, and he grinned at Loki with blood running from his teeth to soak his long beard and crude furs.  Loki didn’t know his story; he had the sudden urge to ask him if that was his own blood or someone else’s in his mouth.  He broke free of the king’s freezing gaze and scrambled back through the door.  The spirit cast no shadow and made no sound, but Loki sensed its pursuit.  He turned and ran, headlong, through the maze of the old palace, away from the lost history he’d uncovered.

 To his shame, he thought only to reach Thor.  He raced up the corridor, his hammering heart pumping fear like ice through his veins.  A wrong turn brought him to a dead end where a door had been bricked over long ago and he wheeled about in the dim, narrow confines, ready to bargain or fight, but nothing was there.  No sounds reached him except for his pulse in his ears and his own ragged breathing.  He counted his heartbeats until they slowed and rational thought returned.  Cautious and slow, he crept back toward the inhabited part of the castle, wary of the darkness before and behind him, of every noise and blind corner, but he found his way back to the disused stair with no further incidents.

His mother was sitting in the kitchen when he came up the stairs, sipping tea as though she often had reason to relax in a seldom used back pantry.

“Loki,” she said, gesturing for him to sit.  “Did you find anything interesting?”

“Mother…I know you said…”

“I’m not angry.  I’ve know for some time that a trove of secrets such as this would be too great a temptation for  you.”  She sighed and passed him a cookie.  “But the west wing has an unsavory reputation for good reason and not everything that walks there is harmless.  Did you see the Mad King?”  Frigga brushed cobwebs out of his hair with her fingers.

“I think so.”  Loki had given up asking how his mother knew things.  Insight passed between them whether he willed it or not.  He still felt cold and shaken from his run in, though he resisted the urge to climb in her lap like a baby.

“He was the first one I saw as well, when your father brought me here as a young bride.”  An unreadable expression crossed her face before she reached over and took his hand.  “Darling, he can’t hurt you unless you listen to him.  Leave him to his fate, for it is well deserved, and never heed his advice.  You will only rarely see him in the halls of the living, so just ignore him.”

“But who was he?  Why is he down there?”

“Never mind that.  He is a very old spirit and I’m not sure he even knows himself anymore.  Just stay out of the west wing, if you would.  If you need a place to think, you might find my garden more…interesting than it has been before.”  Her eyes shone with affection as she imparted this like a secret they would share.

“Could Thor see him?” He needed to know.  He would show his brother the monster in the basement no matter what their mother said.

“No.  This is something you will have all to yourself.  If I’m not mistaken, you will be much better with them than I ever was.  Thor couldn’t see the Mad King, and I know what you are thinking, young man, but it isn’t safe to take him down there.  All the spirits I’ve ever seen have been harmless, either because they have no ill will or because they couldn’t do anything to us, but if you ran into a bad one Thor wouldn’t be able to defend himself at all.”  She kissed his forehead and rose to return to her routine.

 

Loki went slowly through the castle after that, and he found the servants and courtiers that had faded to so much furniture to him now held a new interest.  He wondered if any of them were already dead, going about errands resolved one way or another years before he was born.  That evening when the heat of the day had released its strangling grip he slipped into his mother’s garden to see what she had meant.

Nothing seemed changed, at first.  The same plants sprawled through the little courtyard, carefully landscaped into paths and banks in an artist’s illusion of wildness.  The copse of heart-trees threw shade over the central pond and the music of the stream that fed it soothed his ears.  He stood still and looked with his new sense, opening himself to a wide range of movement and life he had never seen before.

Tiny androgynes stretched and settled to sleep on the leaves of blown late summer roses.  A pale maiden emerged from the pond, long green hair the color of duckweed trailing over her narrow shoulders and concealing her high white breasts.  She leaned on the bank of the pond and watched him, grinning, and beckoned shyly for him to come swim.  He had been swimming in the pond all his life, naked and uncaring in her still water.  The thought made him blush, but he saved the idea for later.

Most of the garden spirits ignored him entirely, he found, at least at first.  But his mother had told the truth, for his mind relaxed as he watched them go about their daily business.  After a few afternoons there, the flower spirits left off courting his mother’s honeybees long enough to wave or bow to him.  When he finally found the courage to approach the pond maiden, he found her very shy.  She often watched him but ducked back into her water with a ripple if he came too close.  One hot afternoon he finally stripped to his trousers (for it no longer seemed proper to go nude, even if the spirits likely wouldn’t care) and went for a swim.

Loki swam easily, pretending to have no idea that he might not be alone.  When his fingers started to prune, he came up out of the water and the pond maiden came up right behind him, pressed against his back.  His brother had begun whispering feverishly to Loki in the night about his exploits with the kitchen girls, and from this source he had expected maidens to be warm and soft, perhaps like kittens.  The pond spirit was no warmer than the water and her skin had a distressing quality of wrongness to it; he could never have mistaken her for human.  She cuddled her cold body against him and nuzzled his neck, draping her dripping green hair over his shoulder, and it felt like she actually flowed around to envelope him like water.

“No!” Loki blurted as she began to kiss his earlobe.  She flowed around to face him, leaving his back drenched, and looked confused.  “That’s not what I wanted,” he said.  She quirked her greenish lips and shifted like liquid, odd to watch but not grotesque, until the pond spirit took on a distinctly male appearance.  He came in close and planted a kiss on Loki’s lips, warm and vegetal like the sun-warmed water, and for a moment, Loki let him.

He ruined it by thinking of Thor.  He was sure, as he had been sure of nothing else in his short life, that he should not think about his older brother while kissing someone else, but for a moment he still pretended the spirit’s inhuman lips belonged to him.  He tried something that Thor had described with his tongue, but the taste of pond water was overwhelming.  It filled him with a different sense of something being wrong, as well.  He could at least be honest here, functionally alone, that he wanted to save this for Thor, even if Thor would never have it, and he pushed away.

“No.  I’m sorry, but this still isn’t what I want.”  The spirit looked crestfallen, and his coloring drained from pale and green to a murky brown like mud swirled through the water.  He turned a glare on Loki and disappeared beneath the surface with a splash.  

“Wait!” Loki called.  “Don’t be angry!”  He got no answer, but something big knocked into him below the water and pulled him under too fast for him to draw a breath.  He held Loki under, unable to tell which way led to air and which way led to the weedy mud, but the prince remained as calm as he could.  Still he began to struggle before the spirit let him up as quickly as he’d gone under, and as he gasped on the surface a wave rose beneath him and dumped him on the bank.

Like many people after a disastrous first kiss, Loki retreated to safer ground.  He headed for the heartwood, wiping his mouth.  The trees of the wood had spirits— he could feel them— but they were ancient and sleepy, and he had never seen them.  He walked beneath his mother’s maple, the leaves already tinted gold with the approach of autumn, and his father’s brooding ash, taken as a sapling from Yggdrasil itself.  He climbed into the welcoming branches of a somber oak.  The tree, younger than some, towered above him, but it was easy to climb to his favorite perch where two branches made a dished and comfortable seat.  Above him he could see the long rent in the silver bark where blonde wood showed through, the place where lightning had struck the tree on the night his brother was born and torn loose a huge branch.  If the bards could be believed, Thor had given his first cry as the thunder cracked and rattled every glass in the palace.  This was Thor’s oak, and to Loki it felt like one of the safest places in his world.

 

As autumn stretched on into a long summer, Thor’s lessons grew more and more demanding while Loki’s shrank to a great deal of unsupervised study.  The queen had the harvest and the winter pantries to manage and there was little he could do to help her.  People already joked about what a lovely princess he made when they thought he couldn’t hear, so Loki packed his books in a satchel and climbed the oak.  Sometimes he studied in the dappled sunshine, but often he daydreamed, books forgotten, or wove little illusions to amuse himself.  Once he even conjured an image of Thor sitting next to him, swinging his legs in the empty space and looking at Loki with a kiss on his lips.  As the image started to lean in, Loki banished it hurriedly and swore he would not create it again.  The dreams were bad enough.

 

Loki woke up on the first crisp day of the year and saw Thor already up and dressed.  His brother was trying to balance a thick stack of books, his sword, and his breakfast while opening the door without a creak to wake his light-sleeping little brother.  His eyes were puffy and dark and the line of his shoulders strained with tension.

“Thor,” he said softly.

“Sorry I woke you,” Thor told him, still just barely balancing the stack.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Come with me today,” Loki said.  The words were out before he knew what he was saying.

“Loki, I can’t, I have diplomacy and…” But he could see in Thor’s eyes he was miserable and longed for a break.  Loki pressed on.

“Is any of it with Father?”

“No.”

“Then you can blow it off for one day.”

“Where would we go?”  Thor still had reluctance in his voice.

“I know a place no one will find us,” he said.  He thought of the heartwood, and his brother’s tree.

“I don’t know…I’ll be in so much trouble.  The Armsmaster will tear strips out of me, and if Father finds out…”

“I’m scared to go alone.  It’s dangerous.” Loki played his last card with a flourish.  Thor couldn’t see the spirits, but the west wing was creepy enough to qualify as an adventure all its own.  “Please?” He put a hint of a tremble in his voice, just enough theatrics to clinch it.  He didn’t care that he looked childish if it got him Thor for a whole day.

“Dangerous?” Finally the mask of dutiful crown prince cracked through and revealed the brother he remembered.  He’d said Thor’s favorite word.  “Don’t worry,” Thor said.  He set down everything except his sword and shoveled the rest of his food into his mouth in bites that would have made his etiquette tutor weep.  “I’ll keep you safe.  Show me.”

 

Loki snuck in and stole enough bread and apples for them to have lunch and wrapped it all in an old tablecloth.  On his way out he snatched three warm honey cakes off a rack right under the head cook’s nose.  Two, or possibly two and half, were for Thor, because Loki knew they were his favorite.  He hid the bundle at the base of the stairs so they wouldn’t have to carry it and they set off into the gloom of the buried castle.

“Are there honey cakes in there?” Thor asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“You just ate breakfast!”

“Yeah but are there?”

“Maybe.”

“I should go first.”  Thor unsheathed his sword, shining and unmarked.  He had only just earned permission to carry it.  Loki had found a secluded spot on the inner rampart where he could watch Thor, stripped to just an under tunic and breeches, spar with the Einherjar for the privilege.

“You don’t know the way.  Put that back before you stab yourself.”

“Who are they?” Thor asked about the tapestries.  “Why is it so dusty down here?  Didn’t we go by this already?”

“Would you please shut up?”  Loki was starting to feel that this had been a poor plan.  Thor, apparently, felt nothing, but to Loki it seemed that his boisterousness was attracting the attention of the things that slept here.

“I thought you said it was dangerous,” by which he knew Thor meant ‘I thought you said this would be fun’.  “There’s nothing scarier down here than some old furniture.”  Thor struck a sparring pose with his sword and crossed the old room, full of empty bookshelves and the shrouded humps of covered chairs, lunging and swinging the blade easily.  “Hah!” he yelled, thrusting the blade into an ancient cushion.  Dust and disintegrated feathers puffed out from the rent and Thor sneezed like a clap of thunder.

“Thor!  Would you quit fucking around?”  He wasn’t acting this time when the shrill note crept into his voice.  Thor sneezed again and the flickering at the edge of Loki’s vision resolved into shadows scurrying around the baseboards, dark shapes that were neither their own shadows nor anything cast by the torchlight.

“All right, Loki, calm down,”  Thor sniffled and wiped his running nose and eyes on his sleeve.  “But I do want to know why we’re down here.”

“There are ghosts down here,” Loki told him when he finally got him clear of the old library.

“Really?”

“Yes really.  I saw one the last time I was down here and mother told me it was dangerous.”

“Whose ghost was it?”

“A king, I think, who has been dead a long time.  He was covered in blood and wore a crown of madness.”

“Well, let’s go, then!  I want to see it too.”

“Try _being quiet_ , then.”

“Hah!  I’ll bet they’re scared of me!”

“Petrified.  Now shut up.”

After that Thor followed him, mostly content to stay quiet, though he did insist on investigating every side room and dark corner along the way.  Loki thought, several times, that he heard a child laughing right behind him, always on the side that Thor wasn’t, and once that they were being paced by what sounded like a big dog, panting and clicking its nails on the stone.  But he saw nothing, and Thor didn’t even hear the noises.  He thought he was avoiding the throne room at the same time he was trying to find it, like something in a bad dream.

Thor’s stomach growled and his nose was smudged with grime by the time the low door of the Mad King’s domain snuck up on them.  Loki wanted to turn back, tempt Thor with cake and get out of here, because he was sure he hadn’t followed the right path to get to the room.

“Is this it?”  Thor asked.  Whatever he saw in Loki’s face, or sensed from the door, caused him to draw his sword again.  He pushed Loki back and went in ahead of him.

“Where is it?  Where’s the ghost?” Thor asked.  “Norns it’s cold in here.  And it stinks!”  It did, indeed; the dust and dried blood stench of the Mad King was all around them.  “Stay behind me,” Thor warned.  He was their mother’s son as well, Loki reasoned, and he could feel something wrong with this room.  Loki hoped he would see the king, as well.  Privately Loki admitted that he had brought his brother down here to scare him a little, for a chance to be the brave one.

“What…What is that?” Thor stammered, staring at the stained dais.  Loki looked over his shoulder and saw nothing, but Thor moved forward, hypnotized, light from the torches gleaming on his blade.

The Mad King appeared behind him, facing Loki with his bloody grin.  He made Loki a mocking bow, as if to thank him, and turned his gaze to Thor, now halfway across the room.  A feeling struck Loki like lightning through whatever sense he used to see the spirits that he really didn’t want the Mad King to come any closer to his brother.  Whatever was about to happen, Thor was in danger.  The smirking ghost began to glide toward Thor and Loki broke into a run.

“Thor!” He grabbed his brother’s arm and tried to haul him sideways, back toward the door.  He made only slightly better progress than he might have trying to pull down his brother’s oak.

“There’s something there,” Thor said, almost to himself.  Loki could feel the cold, charnel draft of the Mad King coming nearer.

“Brother, please!  Please listen,” he begged.  Thor looked at him like a woken dreamer and Loki was able to pull him away from the dais and out of the room. He saw the ghost glide after them, stately as the king he’d been, grinning all the time, but he winked out of existence at the threshold.

“Loki?”  Thor seemed dazed, and the flesh of his arm was freezing under Loki’s palm.

“What did you see?” Loki asked.  Now he would gladly have begged to hear his brother had seen nothing, and that nothing had seen him.

“I don’t know…something was swirling around, a dark shape…”

“It was just a shadow,” Loki told him, trying for a light and flippant tone.  He kept steering Thor away from the throne room, back toward the living part of the castle.

“What?”

“There’s nothing down here, you moron,” Loki tried a laugh and hoped it didn’t sound too forced.

“But you said…”

“It was just a story, Thor.  I just wanted to scare you!  You should have seen your face!”  Loki had to keep Thor from coming down here again, but as his brother’s face went from confused to angry, his chest tightened.  “Come on, let’s go back and have lunch.  There’s another place I know…”

“No!  I should never have listened to you in the first place.  Just take me back.  Now.  I’m in enough trouble without spending the rest of the afternoon trying to get out of here.”

Thor strode off like a thundercloud, the fear and probably the memory of what he’d seen draining out of him.  He waited for Loki each time he came to a split path, but only long enough to see which way to go.

“Thor,” Loki tried again when they reached the back pantry stair.  “I know you’re hungry.  At least sit and eat.”  If he could get his brother to eat, to laugh, he could still get this back.

“Loki…”

“I was scared, too,” he said.  He’d made Thor feel foolish and he would sacrifice a bit of ego, a bit of truth, to take the sting out.  “I got so talked up on my own story that it got to me and I wanted to prove that’s all it was.”

“By the Norns, Loki,” Thor sighed.  “I can’t waste time on this nursery tale bullshit.  There won’t be any time for stories when I’m king.  I should never have listened to you and gone chasing ghosts in the stupid basement.  You know what I’m scared of?  Father.  And the Armsmaster.”  With that, Thor stomped off up the stairs, leaving Loki alone with the floating dust and scurrying shadows.

 

Loki ran for the garden, for the strong arms of the oak, scattering the smaller spirits as he fled past them.  By the time he reached it the tears streamed freely down his face, hot with grief and shame.  He couldn’t even climb, and ended up sobbing in a heap on the mighty roots.  

“What are you doing, sapling?” asked a strange voice.  Loki opened his puffy eyes to a pair of rootlike silver-brown feet.  He scrambled back, his breath still coming in hitches, and met the spirit of his brother’s tree.

“Don’t be frightened,” the spirit said, his voice deep and gentle.  He was tall and broad, with a face like Thor would have in a few more years, his skin the color of his tree’s bark and his eyes leaf green shot with yellow.  His long, unbound hair shone, warm blonde like polished oak, and a long, jagged triangular scar, only a few shades darker, ran from his scalp down his face and neck and over his ribs.

“I’m sorry,” Loki said, his breath still hitching.  He didn’t know for what, or if he apologized to the tree or his absent brother.

“I taste your sorrow in my roots.”

“Are you asking why I’m crying?  I…it’s nothing.  It was stupid.”

“Would you like to come up to your seat?”  The oak lifted him easily and pulled him up to his perch with dizzying speed.

“Have you seen me before?” Loki asked.

“Be certain.  You sit here.  I made this seat for your brother, but he does not come to it.”

“There’s another seat for him,” Loki muttered, bitter and lonely.  “Why are you talking to me now?”

“You smell like one of the others.”

“The other what?”

“The unnatural ones.  The ones who belong elsewhere.”  The spirit looked confused.  “The dead?”

“Oh.  Yeah.  I wanted my brother to see the Mad King.”

“Did he?”

“Maybe a little.  It wasn’t a good idea.”

“No.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“An enemy.  His kind cannot come here, but sometimes they try.”

“I just wanted Thor to notice me,” he said.  The tears started coming again and he wiped his face with his sleeve.  The tree spirit wrapped warm, wooden arms around him and held him against the trunk, and Loki found himself telling him everything, about Thor’s lessons, about his two trips to the west wing, even about his feelings for Thor, how they filled him with equal parts besotted infatuation and burning, shameful dread.

“I cannot understand such things,” the tree told him.  “I drop my acorns where they fall.  But I am connected to your brother and I feel his love for you.”

“Really?”

“Be certain.  The lightning struck me and I burned.  It marked me for him.  You should go now, sapling.  The sun fades.”

“But can I come back?”

“I am always here.”  The tree set him down and nudged him gently on his way.

 

The expected scolding never came; Thor had said nothing of their misadventure in the dead wing, and if the queen suspected anything, she kept her own counsel.  She only gave him his dinner on a tray and shooed him off to bed.

Thor turned up two hours after dark, drenched in sweat and weighed down with exhaustion.  He no longer had his sword with him.

“How bad?” Loki asked in a soft voice.  An old ritual, to be sure.

“I told them I’d been down in the lower city chasing barmaids.”  Thor flopped onto his bed and lay there, arms and legs spread.

“Since just after dawn?”

“I’m an early riser,” Thor chuckled at his own off-color joke.  “I’ve been running laps since I got back.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.  Sometimes while carrying a barrel of rocks.”

“At least it wasn’t Volstagg,” Loki offered weakly.  Thor didn’t quite laugh, but he did grin a little to acknowledge the joke.

“No dinner.  And,” Thor drew a sharp breath, “They took my sword back.”

“I…” Loki didn’t quite know what to say.  He was afraid to say ‘I’m sorry’.  What if Thor didn’t accept?  “I saved you some food,” he said instead, and handed over everything from their morning’s escapade and most of his own dinner.  Thor sat up again gingerly and spread the meal out with his pillow as a plate.

“Thanks.”  He let Thor eat without speaking, each mouthful a hint of forgiveness.  “Here,” Thor said at last, and shoved one of the squashed and crumbling cakes into his hand.  He sat on Loki’s bed to share dessert with him.

“No, that’s all right…I got those for you,” Loki told him.

“Ah, take it.  It was a pretty good story.”  Thor smiled at him, his sweat-stiffened hair falling into his eyes.  “I must have looked like a prize fool down there, swinging a blade at shadows.”

“Then I’m even worse, getting spooked by my own story.”

“The sons of Odin, right?”  Thor punched him in the shoulder.  “Look out world.  Norns, Father was right.  I don’t deserve a weapon if I’m going to do such stupid things, even if they think I went out without my warriors instead of chasing campfire tales in the basement.”

“I just wanted to do something fun,” Loki told him.  He still watched Thor carefully for any sign that he wanted to go back down there.

“I miss you too,” Thor chuckled.  “No matter what I might have said while I was running.  But don’t worry, you’ll have to join me soon.  Next time, we really will go chase some barmaids.”

“Ick,” Loki wrinkled his nose with unfeigned distaste.  There was nothing he wanted less than to watch Thor with some girl in his lap.

“Hah!  Another year or two will change your tune about that as well, baby brother.”  Thor polished off his cake and wrapped his arms around Loki in a tight, half-mocking hug.  “Don’t worry, I’ll defend you from the wenches just as well as I did from the ghosts.”

“You mean not at all?”  Loki squirmed but did not earnestly try to break free of the embrace.

“I’ll defend you from anything, even if it’s just in your head.  What are older brothers for?”

 _So many things_ , Loki thought.  “Getting nasty sweat all over you, it seems.  Get off me and go wash, you big oaf.”  Thor planted a kiss on Loki’s head, getting sticky crumbs in his hair, and stood up, groaning at the stiffness that had settled in his muscles.

 

Though Thor remained preoccupied, Loki found he was not so lonely, now he had befriended the oak.  The spirit listened to Loki as no one else, not even his mother, ever had, soaking up spell theory and stories as the long summer turned to crisp, cool autumn.

One damp day Loki kicked through the wet fallen leaves to the oak but couldn’t find the spirit.

“Oak?” he called.

“My prince,” the spirit replied, his voice emerging from the trunk.

“Come out!  I found something I want to show you.”  He burned to show the book he’d snuck out of the library to someone, and Thor wouldn’t be free for hours yet.

“I would rather not.”  It was hard to tell, but the spirit sounded weary.

“Are you unwell?  Let me see you.”

“If you so command.”  The familiar figure struggled free of the trunk and huddled at the roots.  “Please, show me your marvel.”

“What is the matter?  Why don’t you show me your face?”  Loki reached out and gently turned his friend’s head toward him.

“I thought you might find the effect unsettling.”  Oak looked up and Loki had another glimpse of the future.  The spirit’s face showed him Thor as an old man, a king worn by years bearing the weight of rule.  His brow and eyes were creased, the lines worn by frowns in a face made for laughter, and winter had gotten its hooks in him.  Every trace of green had left his irises now, and even the blaze of autumn sunset orange had faded to a dead and brittle brown.  Loki felt the crunch of every dry fallen leaf he’d trod and wished he hadn’t added to the tree’s sorrow.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t.  Thor loved to be asked about his bruises but the spirit might not feel the same.

“It is death,” the tree said.  “It has happened before.”  Which was not the same as saying no.

“You can’t die!” Loki said.  _I just met you._

“I am not an evergreen.  I die with every old year and return in the new.”  He put a hand, still heavy with strength, on Loki’s shoulder and drew him down to sit with him on his roots.  “It hurts less than the fire.  I was struck by lightning once, you know.  Would you like to hear the tale?”

“Yes,” Loki sighed.  He already knew it, but the spirit rarely offered to tell him stories.

“It came from a clear sky.  I remember watching the stars.  Then part of me tore away and I was on fire.  I knew a fear I was never meant to know, the wailing terror of the newly born, and it seemed the air would be filled with thunder and crying forever, but people came and put me out and the feeling subsided with the flames.  They took the limb I’d lost away and made a cradle for the new prince.”

“Is that why you’re the only one who talks?” Loki asked.

“I think so.  The honor done to me makes me unnatural.  We are not meant to be so aware.  The others in this grove do not fear the snows.”  Loki leaned back against him and the spirit draped an arm over him.  The damp soaked into his breeches and he knew he’d be in trouble for getting muddy, but he didn’t care.

“Oak,” he asked after a while, “Do you like me?”

“My prince?”

“Do you like me.  It’s a simple yes or no.  Would you miss me if I stopped coming here?”

“Yes.  I hope I remember you when the snow melts and I am reborn.”  Loki heard the unspoken “if” in the oak’s weary voice.  “I will look for you.”

“Then I will look for you, too.”  Loki turned to him, studied the face so like his brother’s.  He leaned up and kissed the spirit, hardly aware of what he was doing.  He ran his tongue over the rough lips and tasted sawdust with a slight hint of rot.  The spirit mimicked his movements but Loki felt more confusion from him than passion.  Loki pulled away, disappointed yet again.  It seemed he would never find what he wanted.

“Your moisture is quite pleasant,” the oak offered, sensing that Loki wanted more than he was giving.

“Don’t worry about it,” Loki told him.  “You aren’t…human.”  _And you aren’t him_ , he thought.

“No.”  Loki leaned back against the tree, though his thighs and butt were so chilled he couldn’t feel them anymore.  The tree held him close and seemed to draw comfort from him, which was more than Loki had given anyone else lately.

“Will you stay with me awhile, Prince Loki?  Will you speak to me before I sleep?”

“Of course.  What would you have me say?”  _I’ve never lost a friend before._

“Tell me what you came to say.”  Loki found the urge to share the tale he’d found had turned to ash in his mouth, but he opened the book and did his best.  He told the tree gentle stories, free of dragon fire and Jotun ice, even some of his own tales.

“Be careful in the winter, my prince,” the oak murmured.  “The others are strongest when the sun is weak and many of your defenders are sleeping.”

“I will be,” Loki told him.  He didn’t know what the warning meant but he still accepted it.  “Hush now and rest.”  The oak’s arms went slack and the spirit pulled back within his tree.  Loki forced his cold, stiff muscles to move and dusted the twigs and leaves from his clothes the best he could.  The sun sank low as he trudged back to his rooms to change, and when Thor returned Loki did not show him the story.

 

That night the first hard frost came and limned the dead leaves in a veil of  mourning white.  He could no longer find the oak spirit, and Loki was alone.

 


	2. Winter

Their mother once told him there are things you can do, actions you might take, that will change you forever.  You may not realize it at the time; you may not realize it ever.  But some choices will wind through the rest of your life like a thread through a tapestry and you will never turn back to who you once were.  She was melancholy when she said it, watching her oldest son train with live steel for the first time, and Loki knew she was talking about them growing up, growing away from her, the babies she remembered becoming men before her eyes.  He took her hand and she smiled at him as Thor shouted for them to look.  That winter, the winter the storm spirit came, Loki killed for the first time, knowing even as he did it was one of those choices he could never unmake, and he was never sorry after.

It began with his mother calling him out on the high walls of their home to see something extraordinary.  An early storm approached the castle, one of the rare late autumn blizzards that could kill the unprepared.  Frigga was busy, of course, overseeing the flurry of activity needed to batten down the palace before the snow began.  There were animals and logs to bring in, food stores to check, rooms crowding full with people from the lower city seeking refuge.  But she spared a moment for him, to make sure he didn’t miss the sight, and to seek some reassurance in his company, for Thor and his warriors were out on a hunt and no one could say if they would make it home before the weather turned.

She squeezed him in a quick embrace before returning to her many tasks, and Loki tried to tell her without words that Thor would be all right.  He mostly believed that himself.  Even if they had to ride out the storm in a field camp, he couldn’t imagine anything happening to his charmed brother.

He forgot Thor entirely when he saw the storm spirit.  His mother had described them before , but nothing like her.  Or him; like many of the spirits it was difficult to assign a gender to the towering figure.  She stepped over the horizon, her arms outstretched, draped in swirling white and trailing clouds the color of steel across the sky.  The wind picked up and breathed ice and foreboding down his neck.  Loki stood and watched the spirit approach, beautiful and terrible and inexorable, even when his nose started dripping and he couldn’t feel his fingers.  Heavy white flakes began to drift down with deceitful tenderness as the massive spirit slowed her gait and settled just outside the walls of the city.  Smaller beings scampered and glided about her feet, but Loki didn’t recognize what they were.  He headed down from the wall for a closer look.

Thor and his riders raced over the horizon ahead of the storm’s early sunset and the guards struggled to open the massive gates to admit them.  Loki walked into the courtyard and leaned against a stack of logs, not getting sucked into the flurry of activity going on all around him.  He felt eyes on his neck and turned to find himself face to face with an unfamiliar spirit.  Gaunt and white, she stared at him with eyes the deep, bottomless black of a remote tarn.  Her long hair and tattered, formless sack of a dress dripped phantom water and her sharp-cheeked face split with a terrible smile, her lips and teeth crusted with sludge like dark mud.  Loki felt his heart race but he refused to react.  Showing fear only gave them power.  He shooed the spirit with an imperious gesture and she turned and glided away.  There were others like her in the courtyard, crouched like they were waiting, or hunting, but he felt that he had brushed against the most powerful of them and the others would not move until she did.  

“Riders coming in!  Make way for the prince!”  The gate guard called out as the massive door finally creaked open.  Thor charged through and vaulted from the saddle, landing neatly before Loki.  His cheeks were rosy and his eyes shone, a light dusting of snow caught in his hair and the fur of his cloak.  Loki was struck by his beauty, as he sometimes was, as Thor gathered him into a rib-cracking hug.

“We will be feasting tonight, brother!  You should have seen me against that boar!”  He set Loki down but left an arm around his narrow shoulders.

“I’m sure the pig never stood a chance,” Loki said, more snappish than he meant to sound.  The spirit was making him nervous, standing just behind Thor so he couldn’t keep a good eye on her.

“Don’t be so sour, Loki!  We’ll bring you next time.”

“I don’t even want to go.  It’s just…” The spirit stepped around to Thor’s other side, grinning her horrible grin at Loki.  She reached up and stroked Thor’s face, then stood on her toes to plant a kiss on his lips.  Loki was speechless.  None of them had ever shown any interest in his brother before.  Thor rubbed an absent hand over his lips and a troubled expression flitted over his face as though something pained him.  The spirit stepped back a few paces and her sisters scattered at some unseen signal.

“Just what?” Thor prompted.  His expression returned to normal and his eyes focused on Loki.  “Were you worried about me?”  Thor punctuated this with a squeeze, so close Loki could feel his warm breath in his hair.

“Of course not, you great oaf!  Let me go, it isn’t seemly,” Thor let him go with a chuckle and Loki glared at him without heat.  “I’d never be lucky enough to get snowed in without you.”

“You’d be miserable with me gone,” Thor called as he handed his reins off to a groom and headed inside.  “One day you’ll admit it!”  Thor graced him with one of his dazzling smiles.

“Keep dreaming, brother!” Loki shouted after him.  He tried to sound playful, but the early winter had gotten into his heart.  The snow fell steadily but it didn’t touch the spirit who waited at the door.  Loki snuck inside to spend a long, restless afternoon trying fruitlessly to identify her.

 

Though his brother played the golden prince quite well, Loki’s sharp eyes picked out the signs that something was amiss.  Thor put Loki on his right, an honored place near the fire, and Fandral to his left.  Fandral, the least likely to notice if Thor was unusually quiet, unknowingly shielded his prince from scrutiny with the constant flow of his jests and good humored boasting.  Thor laughed and added just enough to keep the conversation steered where he liked it, Loki noticed, and for once seemed glad to have attention elsewhere.

Before the rest of the meat was served, the cooks brought Thor the warrior’s portion.  The thin slices of boar’s heart still sizzled, faintly lined from the grill.  Dark clotted blood served as a grisly garnish and the whole dish gave off a powerful scent of hot iron.  Loki watched the blood drain from Thor’s face as they set it reverently before him.

“Wait,” Thor told them.  His voice came out thick but clear.  The cooks stood back, waiting for the prince to taste the heart before carving the rest.  “I wish Lady Sif to have the honor tonight,” Thor said with all the princely generosity he could muster.  “She found the beast and drew it to us.  She gave me the killing blow, and I wish to give her the first bite.”  The cooks took the plate back and carried it to the other end of the table, where Sif accepted it with a smirk like it was her due and a faint blush on her cheeks.  She raised the first morsel to her lips and Thor looked away, swallowing hard, a fine sheen of sweat on his brow.  Loki worried for a moment he wouldn’t remain upright, but something outside distracted him, something whiter than the snow moving against the wind.  

Thor picked at his main course, cutting it and spreading it out while eating very little as he’d done with his turnips for as long as Loki could remember.  Loki helped him sneak the uneaten food from his plate without a word, though he felt Thor’s unspoken gratitude as he did it.  Snow fell in killing silence outside the great hall’s narrow windows and from time to time Loki caught sight of a gaunt white figure flitting by beyond the frosty panes.

Thor retired early and Loki followed him, silent and unnoticed as the dark eyes watching them from the window.  He made it all the way back to their room before the first bout of coughing took him, and even when he could breathe he fumbled with his clothes with shaking hands.  Loki helped him undress and tucked him into the thickest furs as he shivered.

“I’m getting Mother,” he said, brushing Thor’s hot, pale face with his cool hand.

“I’m fine,” Thor said.  “Just tired.”  Loki didn’t bother to respond.  He found their mother already awake and donning her heavy robe and slippers.  She sat on Loki’s bed, turning the lamp low, and smiled at him.  He kissed her goodnight and crossed the hall to his own room.  It had once been their nursery, but Loki’s books and desk had replaced the wheeled horses and painted dragons of their childhood.  He rarely slept here, but their old bed remained for when he couldn’t bear to be so close to Thor.  Once it had held them both, but now his feet stuck off the end if he didn’t bend his knees.  He lay in the darkness and listened to the faint hush of falling snow.  Eventually he gave up and pulled his battered stuffed wolf out from under the bed and held him against his chest.  The soft shape was comforting, and after all, no one was here to see.

The following morning, Thor would not get out of bed.  Though he argued petulantly with their mother that he wanted to see the snowstorm, he wasn’t able to take more than a few steps without falling, racked with chills and coughing, and soon fell back asleep.

“Just a touch of winter fever, love,” Mother said, kissing Loki on the forehead.  “It will soon pass.  I thought you boys were too old for it now, but leave it to your brother to prove me wrong.  I know you want to see him, but let’s try to keep you from catching it.”  She settled into a deep padded chair the servants had arranged next to Thor’s bed.  “Be a love and fetch my embroidery basket.  No lessons today, I’m afraid.”

Loki spent the afternoon trying to read, but finally he gave in and dragged his chair over to the window and stared out at the snow.  It seemed inclined to fall forever; every so often he caught a glimpse of the massive storm spirit.  She whipped up the icy wind and shook heavy white flakes from her hair and gown.  Even with both doors shut he could hear his brother’s deepening cough.  That night he slept cradling his wolf again.

 

On the second day Thor’s breath crackled in his lungs and he complained that his chest pained him.  He was restless and bright-eyed with fever and he seemed unable to bear either the covers or the lack of them.  Healers came, all optimism, but they brought troubling news.  Loki stood just outside the door, unnoticed, and learned that pestilence had struck at least a dozen other children in the lower city and among those huddled away from the storm in the castle.  Loki roamed his sprawling home and listened to rumors that the storm had been sent by an enemy, that the crown prince was ill, that Ragnarok was coming early.  That night he made his way to the bathroom for some water and caught sight of a familiar gaunt white figure ghosting across the end of the hall.

 

On the third day Thor couldn’t draw enough air to speak and coughed only feebly.  His breathing had dwindled to an unhealthy wheeze and caused him pain.  The healers returned, but their optimism seemed forced now, and even the Allfather began to take an interest in what was going on.  Loki roamed the castle all night, searching for the spirit, but it seemed to tease him, letting him catch a glimpse of white but never a good look.  He didn’t know what he would do if he caught her, anyway.

 

The fourth day, Frigga stopped caring if Loki stayed in their shared room.  She was tired and hoarse from singing and talking, but she welcomed her younger son with a hug.  She showed Loki how to tend his brother, how to change the cooling compress and drip lukewarm medicinal tea into his mouth so he wouldn’t choke, and then she left to bathe and rest a few hours.  Loki climbed on Thor’s bed next to him and held his hot, dry hand.  His brother looked so much younger lying there, gasping and weak, and for the first time Loki was afraid.  The spirit crouched in the door of the bedroom, long white-and-filth fingers splayed on the floor, and she stared at Thor.  Loki regarded her cooly until she turned to him and hissed before backing off a few feet.  He kept his eye on her as he tended to Thor, telling him his favorite stories of maiden-rescuing warriors and farting trolls, and missed his brother’s booming laugh.

 

On the fifth day, they dug the first graves.  Small trenches in the packed snow accepted their shrouded burdens and the storm buried them, slow and gentle, to sleep until the spring thaw allowed them their permanent rest.  Thor’s death crouched at the foot of his bed, crooning to him, and only Loki could see it.   His mother’s eyes were rimmed in red and the healers went through their spells with grim faces as the mourning bells tolled.

Loki burrowed into the blankets next to Thor, eyes sandy with sleep, but he wasn’t willing to give up his vigil.  The worst part about it was that if he closed his eyes, he couldn’t feel the spirit at the foot of the bed at all.  No sense of weight, no cold spot, nothing.  Thor’s body burned next to his and left Loki sweating, but he wrapped an arm over his brother’s chest anyway so he could feel the uneven rise and fall.  Finally his mother tucked the covers around them and left for a moment.  Loki slipped out of his feigned sleep and sat up.

“Get out,” he told the spirit.  “You can’t have him.”  She spared him a glance and he swore the damned thing was smirking at him.  “I don’t know what you are doing to him, but stop.  I’ll…I’ll fight you,” he told her.  She hissed at him and lunged, not for his face but for Thor’s.  She knelt on his chest and stuck two long fingers in his mouth, crooning her tuneless song, and Thor’s breath stopped.

Loki couldn’t even think, he just grabbed his magic and shoved at her, channeling his anger and fear into driving her back.  It got a result, at least, and she turned her dark glare at him but retreated to the foot of the bed again.  Her fingers pulled out of his throat and Thor woke with a half-gagged gasp.  He struggled to raise his head and from the fear in his eyes Loki knew he could see the spirit.  He struggled to get in front of Loki and tried to call out.

“Thor, hush,” Loki told him, pulling him back into bed.  Thor resisted but his labored, shallow breaths and overall weakness meant for once he was no match for Loki.

“Is it really there?” he whispered.  His eyes were wide and he held Loki’s hand tightly.  Loki felt their roles reversed, years of climbing into his older brother’s bed when dreams and shadows frightened him.

“It’s only your fever,” he told him.  Not quite a lie.  “I’m here.  You’re safe.”  That last was much closer to falsehood.  Thor looked back once again to the grinning spirit at his feet and buried his face against Loki’s side.

“Tell me a story,” Thor’s voice came out in a strained whisper, but it was clearer and stronger than he’d heard it in days.  “The one about the bride who got a dragon for a wedding gift.”

“All right,” Loki smiled and stroked his golden hair, something he longed to do often but doubted Thor would allow if he weren’t so ill.  That was one of his own stories, one he rarely told anyone else.   “A witch lived alone with her beautiful daughter…”

“Skip to the funny part,” Thor implored him.

“Don’t think you can stay awake?”

“No.”  Thor nestled close, his burning brow against the cool skin of Loki’s collarbone.

“Brat,” Loki told him fondly.  He skipped ahead, eyes locked always on the spirit.  She grinned her dark grin, face luminous in the fading firelight, like she enjoyed his struggle but knew she’d won.  When Thor slipped into sleep Loki felt a sense of finality, like his brother would never wake again.

 

 

The next morning Thor’s strength had fled.  His fever peaked and he struggled against monsters in his dreams, feeble and muttering.  The healers only shook their heads and the hard line of his mother’s spine told him as much as the mourning bells and the gravediggers working through the brief break in the snow.  The clocks told him it was afternoon, though he hadn’t seen the sun as more than a dim half light since before the storm spirit came, when Thor stopped even those struggles.  His breath was so shallow it was almost imperceptible and his face faded further from pale to grey to blue around his lips and eyes.  His death now sat behind his head, her long thin fingers twitching and eager to catch her prey.  Their father arrived and his face said what none would say aloud: the prince would not last another night.  Loki felt his father’s wordless disappointment on him as well, and privately suspected he wished to trade him for Thor.

He couldn’t stay in the stifling, sorrowing room any longer.  He roamed the cold castle, finding many rooms where the fires had gone out, dark as twilight with the shutters pulled to keep the snow piled up against the windows in tall drifts from breaking the glass.  The few guards and servants he saw huddled in little groups, faces grave and distracted.  They looked at him as though he were a ghost himself, as though they’d expected him to fade away alongside his dazzling brother.  He took a hunting knife from his room, long and gleaming with an arctic wolf carved into the bone handle.  It had been meant as a gift for Thor, but another purpose formed in Loki’s mind as he made his way down the dim, hushed corridors.

He couldn’t find his way until he stopped thinking about it.  Down the back kitchen staircase, past the room of tapestries and the disused pantries and the dusty portraits of the dead.  When he let go of remembering and simply walked, he soon found his way into the ancient wing he sought, and the low door to the Mad King’s throne room.  Loki stepped slow and deliberate to the stained dais, scanning the gloom for any sign that his mad ancestor was around and interested in talking.

“Come out, you loony old bastard,” he called.  “I have what you want.”  He put the sharp blade of the knife against his wrist and pressed until a thin line of red welled up around it.  When the first droplet hit the stone, the Mad King appeared in a breath of cold air, grinning his bloody grin.  “You know what I want you to do,” Loki told him.  He thought the ghost nodded, his eyes glinting with sadistic pleasure.  Loki cut himself more deeply, letting his blood flow, and without giving himself time to think thrust his arm into the Mad King’s shade.

Loki’s vision dimmed and his hand went bloodless cold.  He saw all around him flickering images of the Mad King’s life, feasts and battles, sex and torture all jumbled together without chronology.  He saw the fate of the dead man’s father, of his brothers and their wives and children and retainers, even the dumb loyal beasts of their households, extirpated down to the last yapping pup beside the last bloody cradle.  The king showed him Thor as he had seen him, healthy and swaggering, and Loki squeezed his eyes shut.  Still the Mad King put forth an offer behind his lids, and he saw his brother’s corpse laid out for burial and all of Asgard draped in black.  His sorrowing parents turned their love wholly to Loki, and the realm grew to adore him; later, the king promised, they would fear him.  He saw himself as a grown man, Gungnir in his hand and a great crown with gilded horns on his head, a sorcerer Emperor to make all nine realms despair, and a throng of hungry spirits bound to servitude at his feet.

The visions tugged at him and for one terrible moment he wavered, as on the edge of an abyss, but then he remembered himself and struggled to recall the mental exercises he knew to offer protection.  He focused on the first thing he had seen, on Thor vibrant and alive, and tried hard to resist adding a gleam of love to his brother’s blue eyes.  This is what I want, he thought.  This is ALL I want from you. 

Energy pulled out of him with his blood and the King’s grin grew wider.  The phantom blood in his teeth and beard now glistened, red and wet, and Loki knew he would never stop until the prince was a lifeless husk on the floor, so for the first time he pitted his will against a spirit.  His magic came to him and he pushed back with all his mind, thinking of his brother who would die without his help, his mother’s grief, and his anger at the two spirits, one right in front of him and one up above him somewhere, who dared try to take things against his will.  Slowly he pulled from the Mad King’s grasp and held his wrist against him.  The bleeding had stopped and his hand remained cold and drained, but his mind was his own again.

“Now repay me,” he commanded the leering king.  The ghost vanished and he thought he had been betrayed, but then an icy grip descended on the back of his neck and steered him forward.  The smell of cold, musty air and old blood surrounded him until it was hard to breath, but he fought his fear and went where the Mad King led.

Deeper into the ancient wing they went, past more low doors and the supports for more modern parts of the castle sunk carelessly through the ceiling, until finally the grip forced him down and through a narrow gap where a wall, hastily bricked over an entrance, had partially collapsed.  Even Loki’s thin shoulders had a hard time passing through the opening and the rough, crumbled stone scraped at him as he wriggled through.  He found himself in a small room, totally dark except for the faint luminescence of the King’s ghost behind him.  His eyes adjusted to the pale shade-light and showed him a burial chamber, the ancient corpse of an immortal shrouded in ages of dust.  He didn’t want to go any closer but the grip was inexorable.

The Mad King shoved Loki toward his corpse, buried, bricked away and forgotten with haste some unknown time ago.  Loki was glad of the darkness now that he was close, though the flickering light gave the hollow, dead face an unholy appearance of life,  as though expressions passed across the features of a dreamer, able to wake up at any moment.  The eyes were closed but he recognized the awful grin that had settled permanently on his face.

A mind not his own steered him to kneel next to the body and guided his hand to a hidden catch in the burial niche that he would never have found.  A panel slid open and his hand reached in, and for a moment Loki could scarcely breathe for fear of what his fingers would brush across, but it was only the familiar dusty softness of an old book.

He pulled the book out and the grip released him, leaving him with an ancient grimoire sealed against him with dire and unknown magic.  The Mad King stood before him once again, partially within his own body,  and he tapped the book with his bloody phantom fingers.  It sprang open and the heavy parchment pages ruffled on their own before stopping with finality.  The King grinned at Loki and looking over the spell he knew he had what he needed, if he was willing to pay the price.  The book was his now, full of a dark and ancient practice of magic no longer used.  His mother would hate for him to have this.  He knew just the place to hide it.

 

It took the rest of the afternoon to assemble the ingredients he would need.  He hid them within his tunic and went to check on Thor.  Little had changed in the sick room, though the Allfather was not present.  Their mother paid no attention to Loki making her tea and took it from him, all trusting, with a tired, distracted smile.  She drank deeply and gathered him into a fierce hug, rocking him against her as she shook.  She made no sound but Loki could feel her tears soaking into his hair.  He hugged her back until the drug took her and she slumped into a deep sleep.  Loki wrapped her shawl around her and stepped to the bed.  Thor looked already dead, but Loki couldn’t spare him any attention right now.  His focus was all for her, the spirit who was hurting his brother, and she gloated at him as she waited for Thor to succumb at last.

He took the spell’s main component out of his shirt, a little doll neatly stitched from his brother’s night shirt and scarlet cloak and stuffed with fragrant dried herbs and scraps of fabric.  With their mother’s embroidery scissors he cut a lock of Thor’s hair and with the sharp blade he pricked the finger of his limp hand and smeared the sluggish drop of blood on the doll’s white face before stitching the hair in place on the doll’s head.  He looked the spirit in the eye and cinched the last stitch, sealing the spell as he did.  She curled around Thor and hissed at him, but Loki’s resolve was like steel, glittering like the Bifrost itself.

He took the doll and shook it before her eyes like teasing a cat with a toy and the spirit couldn’t help but follow it, just as the grimoire had promised.  Her attention was forced from Thor to the crude little effigy and Loki had her hooked.  He turned and walked out of the room.  At this step he would win or fail; he could not look back and had to go forward on faith, assured that the spirit would be compelled to follow.

Loki had never held a spell for so long and it hurt like straining a muscle, but he gritted his teeth and climbed the steps in the freezing wind and blowing snow, up to the highest battlements of the castle where he’d stood the day the spirit found Thor.  He spoke the final words of the spell and hurled the doll with all his strength into the void beyond, watching it tumble into the lower city until it was lost in the white.  His heartbeat slowed and he found he held his breath as he waited until at last the spirit appeared next to him on the battlements.  She hurled herself off the wall with a last dark glare of pure hate, wailing a wordless curse for only him to hear as she fell.

Loki ran back to Thor and broke into his room expecting to find him awake, but nothing had changed.  Thor still lingered near death and their mother slept next to him.  Loki knew his body was like ice but he returned to Thor’s side as if he could hold him in this world.

“Stay with me,” Loki whispered to him, brushing kisses over his face.  “I love you.”  He found he could say that, with no one to hear, except maybe Thor somewhere deep within.  Loki sat with him, whispering stories to him until they devolved to total nonsense.

In the deepest part of the night when death seemed the closest, Thor’s fever broke.  He began to sweat and moaned in his stupor.  Loki felt the nagging tail of the spell snap shut like a snare and knew someone in the lower city had picked up the doll.  He wondered who it was, a child or a guard or someone gathering wood, who would die in his brother’s place.

Their mother woke with a start to find the snow had stopped and dawn was creeping weakly over the horizon.  Both her sons slept, deep and natural, the elder curled into the younger’s embrace, and she reassured herself that both were still breathing.  The queen ran to her husband to stop preparations for a royal funeral, and though they planned a feast of thanksgiving she found her hands cold and shaky, her heart trembling with a fear she couldn’t put into words.  Her oldest, her golden boy, had escaped Niflheim, yet she still felt some liminal moment had passed forever.

“Loki?” Thor asked when his eyes fluttered open.  His lungs still crackled but the healers’ infusions were finally showing some effect.

“About time you woke up,” Loki told him.  “I thought you would sleep forever.”  Loki gathered Thor to him, crushing his face into his brother’s broad chest.

“Loki…Loki, OW.”

“Sorry,” he muttered and let Thor sink back against his pillows.  “How do you feel?”

“Hungry,” Thor told him.  “And weird.”

“Weird how?” Loki asked sharply, not even taking the opportunity to taunt.

“I had the strangest dreams…something was chasing me.  A ghost or something.  It almost had me, and then it left.  I think you were there.”

“I’ve been here,” Loki confirmed.  “It was just the fever,” he lied, “Making you dream.”

 

The Mad King’s knowledge burned at Loki like unspent money.  As his brother slowly regained his strength Loki spent more and more time with the old grimoire, taking its words into himself, learning to bind and banish and compel spirits.  He returned to the tomb deep beneath the west wing and found more old and forgotten books, including a bestiary of sorts.  In its pages he found the spirit he had bested, the nameless Queen of the Drowned.  Someone had sent her against his family, it seemed, and Loki vowed to improve his skills.  No one else could protect his brother from this sort of attack, he reasoned, and he needed to be ready.  His enemy already had a huge advantage over him.

 

On the third day after Thor awoke they buried the last victim of the strange fever, a little orphaned girl with the same lovely blonde hair as his brother.  Loki felt a new thread woven within his magic, dark as a grave woven in with the deep green, and though the queen’s heart quailed to feel it when they joined power, she never spoke of it, never asked what he had done.  Loki had taken his first life, even before his battle-born elder brother, but he never told anyone the tale, and he was never sorry, after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like there to someday be a Spring and Summer as well, but I have no idea what would happen in them besides "maybe porn?"


End file.
